Is the 2025 SEC the Best Conference Ever?
Breaking down this all-time great conference, historical conference rankings and trends, and whether or not it will all matter in March.
Way back in the first week of December, the SEC made a statement by going 14-2 in the ACC-SEC challenge, with only ACC wins coming from Duke (over Auburn) and Clemson (over Kentucky). Since then, the conference has continued to flex it’s muscles and raise debate over whether or not it is the greatest conference in college basketball history. As of the AP rankings released today (Feb. 17th) the SEC has nine of it’s sixteen teams in the top-25, with five of those falling in the top-8! Ken Pomeroy, in his eponymous KenPom rankings, lists ten SEC squads in its top-35 while Bart Torvik’s data projects fourteen teams to make the NCAA tournament. The father of bracketology, Joe Lundari, also puts 14 teams in his latest projections, with just South Carolina and LSU missing the big dance. So we have legitimate reason to ask if this is the best conference in college basketball history.
By the numbers
I was able to gather KenPom conference-level adjusted efficiency data dating back to 2001, and in that timespan, the 2025 SEC reigns supreme - by a wide margin.1
This year also features two other teams in the top-15; the Big Ten and Big XII. The SEC also touts the best offensive adjusted efficiency over the past 25 seasons.2 We can see that all other conferences in the top-10 all time have gotten at least 60% of their teams into the tournament. If the SEC does in fact get the 14 teams in that Lunardi projects, they would have 87.5% of their conference represented in the big dance, crushing the record of 70% previously held by the Big XII which did so six-times. Adjusted efficiency is highly related to the number of teams a conference gets into the tournament, as the correlation between conference AdjEf and number of bids in a ridiculous 0.821. This translates to adjusted efficiency accounting for a whopping 67% of the variance in NCAA tournament bids!
Will this matter once the tournament begins?
While a stronger conference generally gets more teams in the tourney, what happens when the games actually begin? Below are the correlation coefficients between conference adjusted efficiency and the percent of its teams that make the tournament’s second weekend and beyond.
Sweet 16: 0.538
Elite 8 0.281
Final 4 0.322
Championship Game 0.307
National Champion 0.143
So while their a a strong relationship between conference strength and making the Sweet Sixteen, getting to subsequent rounds, especially winning it all, is less related to conference strength. The pure dominance of the SEC may buck this trend, however, as a logistic regression to predict winning the national championship based on adjusted efficiency gives the SEC a 77.5% chance of having one of it’s teams cut down the nets on the first Monday in April.
Trending Up
This season does not appear to be an anomaly for the SEC. The conference has been trending up, particularly over the past three seasons. In fact, if you go back roughly a decade, the SEC was the worst of the traditional “Power-6” conferences — ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big XII, Pac-12, and SEC — every year from 2013-2016, with the exception of 2015 when it narrowly edged out the Pac-12 for second-to-last. Even the Mountain West Conference rated higher than the SEC in 2013. Below are yearly charts of the nine best conferences by KenPom adjusted efficiency dating back to 2001. Notice the gradual upward trend of the SEC, with a significant spike since 2023.
While the SEC has not been the most powerful conference this century, it is certainly on an upward trajectory. With the copious amounts of NIL money flowing into that league and massive media rights deals, it’s very reasonable to assume the SEC will continue to be in the discussion of college basketball’s best conference year-in and year-out, even if this level of dominance is unsustainable (which is likely, but in college sports today, who knows!!). For reference, below is the average adjusted efficiency, per KenPom, of every conference over the 2001-2025 timespan.
The Big XII reigns supreme, and the SEC is solidly in 5th-place, but given the recent decline of the ACC, and shallower-pocketed Big East in a down year, it wouldn’t be crazy to imagine the SEC jumping into 3rd sooner rather than later.
Ending with a poll question — will an SEC team cut down the nets in April, or will the lack of correlation between conference strength and national champion hold true with another conference taking the crown?
Using the hoopR package in R from https://hoopr.sportsdataverse.org/.
Offensive adjusted efficiency represents points scored per 100 possessions, adjusted for opponent.